GUEST COLUMN
How objective can judging be?
IBELIEVE that incompetence, if not outright corruption, exists in our sport. Judges are humans, who generally love boxers and boxing, and by association they could naturally harbour a little bias for one of the boxers in a bout they are judging. I love boxing deeply and would love for everything to be above board, but at certain levels in this game when literally millions upon millions of dollars are at stake, it becomes much more of a business than a sport. To think some level of corruption doesn’t exist in a multimillion-dollar business would be incredibly naive.
I believe that certain fighters may receive favouritism from officials anywhere there is professional boxing and a lot of money to be made. It might not be a stretch to believe that Las Vegas – a city that relies on the amount of people who frequent it and its establishments – would push in every way possible for the biggest draws to get certain amounts of benefits afforded to them.
A judge can simply vote for either fighter, no matter what happens in the ring. It is their opinion, so they can always just claim that they judged the fight based on their viewpoint at the time. The fact is, each judge’s decision is nothing more than an opinion of what they just watched.
I remember one time being in the corner for a fighter and I noticed a judge at ringside getting ready to work the fight and I was instantly caught off guard because I knew this person and I was of the strong opinion that they were not qualified to work as a judge for a professional fight. I instantly alerted the head trainer of the fighter to the situation, but by then it was too late to have anything done about it. The fight went the distance and this judge literally had the fight scored the complete opposite of the other two more qualified judges. On that particular night a travesty was avoided, but had there been two such judges instead of one the wrong boxer would have unjustly had his career forever altered by the hand of sheer incompetence.
I also recall a time years ago when I watched a friend of mine defend his world title on HBO in a big fight against a much more heralded, popular and connected opponent. Even though I couldn’t hear the ring announcer and the television broadcasters because of the noise in the place we were watching it, I was certain the champ had successfully defended his title, so much so that we didn’t even stick around to see the official announcement.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I found out they had given the decision unjustly to the challenger. That was when I first realised that in professional boxing, no matter how obvious things seem to even the most educated eyes, it only matters what the working judges at ringside say about it.
People may say that Canelo Alvarez gets lucky with decisions in Las Vegas, but in reality if someone gets favouritism then that isn’t luck, that’s bias. One thing that keeps coming back to me is that several times in the days immediately prior to the Canelo vs Gennady Golovkin rematch, I read people saying that “there’s no way the promoters are going to let ‘GGG’ win a close fight over Canelo.” I have unfortunately learned over the years that no matter how a fight appears to your own educated eyes, any combination of bias, incompetence and/or corruption can unjustly overrule knowledge and sense and, because of that, no matter how a fight appears to play out in my mind, I now make sure to stick around and listen to the announcement of the decision.
Now, I am not calling anyone out or pointing fingers and claiming to have any knowledge of corruption in regards to Golovkin vs Canelo. I do know that in a general sense, however, it has always been true that powerful promoters have people within the inner workings of the game, from media to officials and everyone in between, who have an unspoken allegiance to their wishes, and some have certainly exercised that allegiance when the opportunity has arisen.